IndiGo CEO Pieter Elbers on Becoming a ‘Global Aviation Player’

03.06.2024 - 04:29 / skift.com / Peden Doma Bhutia / Pieter Elbers

IndiGo CEO Pieter Elbers told Skift that the airline’s new business class product would stay faithful to the IndiGo brand and that it’s the right time for an “IndiGo-like product” to serve the next wave of Indian air travelers.

“We now have a whole generation coming up that has never flown business class. Similarly, years ago there was a whole generation in India, that’d never taken a plane, who then became our first-time fliers,” Elbers said.

India’s largest airline has announced a radical shake-up of its operating model. IndiGo says it will debut a business class product by the end of this year.

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Elbers noted that as India, its economy and the consumers are changing rapidly, IndiGo is building an approach to address those changing customer needs.

In the latest of our Leaders of Travel: Skift C-Suite Series, we sit down with Elbers to find out his plans of turning IndiGo from what he calls a “domestic giant” into a “global aviation player.”

Skift: How dependent is IndiGo’s expansion on the India story? If the economy disappoints contrary to the current expectations, can your expansion plan still succeed?

India is largely underserved in terms of number of planes and seats per capita. If the economic growth slows down, aviation will still grow, perhaps at a different percentage, as long as infrastructure and airports continue to be built. With our leases we have very good flexibility and almost continuous evaluation of what our capacity should be.

We have a continuous influx of planes, more than one per week for the next decade. However, our net fleet depends on how many planes we flush out. When supply chain challenges began a year and a half ago, which grounded some planes, we managed to maintain our capacity as promised. Through a whole range of mitigating measures, we’ve been able to deal with external circumstances to keep our growth in place, it can also be the other way around if circumstances so dictate.

You have a domestic market share of over 60%. However, international operation is a totally different beast. Would you ever consider an alliance with a Middle Eastern carrier?

Internationally, the accumulative share of Indian carriers is significantly lower than the share of foreign carriers and clearly given the fact that the market is in India itself, that’s a bit odd. We are starting to build on getting our share in those markets and a lot of the recent initiatives are helping us regain that.

When it comes to alliances and partnerships, we work with 7 foreign airlines. This gives them access to the market in India and it gives us an opportunity to create brand awareness and get additional passengers. For partnerships and collaborations, we have a pragmatic